A look back at some really old comics by an even older comics fan

Month: August 2018

Marvel Comics’ original summer tradition of publishing “King-Size Special!” annual issues featuring (mostly) new material had a relatively brief heyday in the Sixties — just six years, really. I’ve known that for decades, but before digging into my collection to do the research or this blog, I hadn’t realized how very few of those annuals I actually bought new off the stands. While I’d bought my first Marvel comic book in the summer of 1967, I didn’t pick up any annuals until the summer of 1968 — and that was the last year that the specials featured all-new material, at least for a while. As it turns out, I just managed to catch the very tail end of this golden era of Marvel annuals. And I’d end up buying all of two off the spinner rack Read More

By August, 1968, I’d been buying Amazing Spider-Man regularly for eight months; and if it hadn’t vet become my very favorite comic book, it was awfully close. I wasn’t quite ready to start investigating his earlier, reprinted adventures in Marvel Tales just yet (perhaps because I wasn’t yet sold on the other Marvel heroes he shared space with in that twenty-five center — Thor and a solo Human Torch — or perhaps because at that time I still thought Steve Ditko’s artwork looked a little strange), but otherwise, I was buying everything your friendly neighborhood arachnid appeared in.

Or I was trying to, anyway. I know for sure that when the full-age ad shown below had turned up in Marvel’s comics that spring, I’d been pretty darned jazzed, and had had every intention of buying the book: Read More